Table Of ContentON RUNNING AND
BECOMING
HUMAN
An Anthropological
Perspective
Thomas F. Carter
On Running and Becoming Human
Thomas F. Carter
On Running
and Becoming
Human
An Anthropological Perspective
Thomas F. Carter
University of Brighton
Eastbourne, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-74843-6 ISBN 978-3-319-74844-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74844-3
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To Kiri for being, and making her environs and mine become our world
A
cknowledgments
This book would have never emerged without the great encouragement
about running I received from Jeff Pagel and Phil Rogosheske as a young
man. Though they are unlikely to ever see this and probably do not remem-
ber an earnest, shy, scrawny runner, their early influence and wisdom
remains with me to this day. I have trod many paths over years and those
paths eventually brought me to Eastbourne. The support of my compatri-
ots at the University of Brighton and our occasional runs along the seafront
and around Whitbread Hollow served as therapeutic mobile meetings
where many an idea and project were hashed out over the years, though
they had no idea that this project would ever begin and emerge. Most
notable among those who ran alongside me were members of the Chelsea
School: John Sugden, Dan Burdsey, Jayne Caudwell, and John Lambert.
A debt of gratitude, and probably a good bottle of red, goes to Mark
Doidge for putting me in touch with the commissioning editors at Palgrave
in the UK who kindly passed me on to the great staff at Palgrave USA, who
have been enthusiastic and incredibly helpful and understanding with this
project as it ran its own route through Palgrave’s publication processes.
Alexis Nelson, Mary al-Sayed, and Kyra Saniewski have been fantastic
before handing the baton over to the production team. Time to lace up my
shoes and head for the hills.
vii
c
ontents
1 First Steps 1
2 A Runner’s Mind 19
3 A Runner’s Environs 43
4 A Runner’s Body 65
ix
CHAPTER 1
First Steps
Abstract This essay introduces the basis of the book by resituating how
we should think about running. Running is both a natural and learned
form of locomotion. It is a form of enskilled movement that we learn at a
very young age. Learning how to move and how to sense those move-
ments are crucial elements to the emergence of the human mind. Thus,
running is so much more than a lifestyle sport mostly enjoyed by the white
middle classes based on the value of endurance. Rather, our first running
steps facilitate the emergence of the human mind and thus one of the ways
we become human beings. This introductory essay then lays the ground-
work for the three entangled essays that comprise the whole of this book
and mirrors the dynamic of mind, environs and body that leads to our
becoming human.
Keywords Running • Enskilled movement • Learning • Becoming
• Being
I don’t wear earphones when I run. I hate having music blaring in my ears,
cutting me off from the rest of the world. A song might enter my head
accompanying the rhythm of my movement. No song in particular; just
some familiar pop song dredged up out of the recesses of my mind and
resonating through the echo chamber that is my skull. Instead, I strive to
be like N. Scott Momaday’s runner:
© The Author(s) 2018 1
T. F. Carter, On Running and Becoming Human,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74844-3_1
2 T. F. CARTER
He was alone and running on. All of his being was concentrated in the sheer
motion of running on, and he was past caring about the pain. Pure exhaus-
tion laid hold of his mind, and he could see at last without having to think.
He could see the rain and the rivers and the fields beyond. He could see the
dark hills at dawn. He was running, and under his breath he began to sing.1
I, however, certainly do not sing when I run. Wheeze, maybe. But sing?
Definitely not. I stride across the South Downs, a ridge of chalk hills in the
South of England. The windswept, steeply sloping grassy fields practically
disappear beneath my feet as my awareness of my feet contacting the
ground slips away with every meter I cross. I have no idea how far I have
gone or how long I have been gone. I simply am. I am running and thus
I am a runner and as such, I am thoroughly ensconced as part of the
world. I am not separate from it; my awareness takes in the rhythmic shush
of waves caressing the shingle far below, the cry of terns coming off their
cliffside nests or larks suddenly erupting out of cover and hovering above
me as I approach and then pass. The rustling of something unseen in the
gorse, the play of the clouds and sunlight mirror the dance of the long
grass and my own legs, and the wind’s soft caress across my skin softly
echoes the passage of birds overhead and my footfalls on the exposed
chalky soil. I am aware of all these things as much as I am aware of my
body—there is no distinction between it and the birds, the wind, and the
sea. To become fully human is to become an integrated aspect of the world
much as Momaday describes.
This manifestation of being alive, of being a runner, is one that is dif-
ficult to articulate yet is a relatively common feeling amongst runners as
well as other practitioners of various physical activities. It is through physi-
cal exertion, and the sensory experiences of those exertions, that one
becomes more attuned to, more aware of, being; not just being in isola-
tion as a solitary individual entity but as being part of the world. This
expansive sense of existence, the making of the runner, is achieved through
various sensory experiences. That sense of being, however, does not even
begin to be captured in the popular and academic articulations about run-
ning. Something vital is being missed: the ways of being that Momaday
captures and it is what Momaday extracts that is the focus of this book.
This book is about running, but it is not about how running is most
commonly thought of. Running is not what we think it is. It is more.
“Running” commonly means a particular form of running that is both
culturally and historically specific. Running has been incorporated into
FIRST STEPS 3
what we commonly recognize as sport, and therefore there are certain
evaluative assumptions made about becoming a runner and the act of run-
ning itself. Those values are embedded so deeply into the current secular,
consumer capitalist, globalized worldview that the idea that running might
actually be something much less and much more than this eludes most
runners. They glimpse it, sense it just beyond their ken, but cannot seem
to come to grips with that elusive will-o’-the-wisp at the cusp of their
awareness precisely because of the underpinning values that hold them to
their particular ways of moving.
Runners are ubiquitous presences in most leading socioeconomic capital-
ist societies in the world. In their brightly colored clothing, these runners
are class-specific, oriented toward capital as evidenced in their motivations
for personal betterment, to both feel better about themselves and also
exhibit the dominant tropes of good health embodied by the middle classes
of Europe and America—most especially, but certainly not exclusively, the
white middle classes. The self-help books, the “runner’s guides,” the stores
selling advice and technologies, all reflect the predominant message that
anyone can run.2 Popular first-person accounts of the “average” person
regaling their “adventures” and how running makes them feel reinforce the
notion that anyone can run.3 Of course, anyone can run, but what those
stories really mean is that most anyone can become a “runner.” But one can
only be a runner if one follows certain symbolic precepts, one of which is to
consume the latest technologies that show anyone passing that you are a
runner. There is an entire “running” industry with its own ideological con-
struction of “the runner” tied into t echnology, specific values, and tech-
niques of the body4 that reflect twenty-first-century capitalist values.
One is that hard work will inevitably lead to success. This belief, a cen-
tral and core dictum of the runner’s way of life, persists despite the simple
truth that there is no reliable connection between the quantity of effort
and the realization of one’s dreams. Another core value held to be self-
evidently true is that the virtue of hard work is somehow ennobling. The
very act of striving to improve, to dedicate one’s self to a task, makes you
a better person. A related value is that through running you can become
the person you always wanted to be and that if you manage to transform
your being through running that will naturally lead to a complete transfor-
mation of yourself and the rest of your life as well. This too is part of the
running dogma. All of these are patently false as universal laws. They
might apply to any given individual. Such personal change can happen.
But none of those values are inherent to the actual act of running and
none are guaranteed to prove true for you.
